Events this term

Comfy Lounge,
2015-01-15,
7:00 PM:
Elections for Winter 2015 are being held! Submit a nomination and join
your fellow members in choosing this term's CSC executive. (Please note
the time change to 7PM.)

MC 2017,
2015-01-21,
6:00 PM:
Alex Tsay from AeroFS will talk about the high availability distributed
file systems they develop.
The CAP Theorem outlined the fundamental limitations of a distributed system.
When designing a distributed system, one has to constantly be aware of the
trade-off between consistency and availability.
Most distributed systems are designed with consistency in mind. However, AeroFS
has decided to build a high-availability file system instead.
In this tech talk, I'll be presenting an overview of AeroFS file system,
advantages and challenges of a high-availability file system, and examine the
inner workings of AeroFS's core syncing algorithm.

DC 1302,
2015-02-05,
3:30 PM:
Part of the Cheriton School of CS' Distinguished Lecture Series, MIT's Leslie Kaelbling will
discuss robotic AI applied to the messy real world. We make a number of
approximations during planning but regain robustness and effectiveness
through a continuous state estimation and replanning process. This allows
us to solve problems that would otherwise be intractable to solve optimally.

EV3 1408,
2015-02-27,
6:00 PM:
The first code party of Winter 2015, and we have something a litle different
this time. We're running a Code Retreat (coderetreat.org) with Boltmade.
The result of this is that you will be able to do a coding challenge, wherein
you implement Rule 110 (like the Game of Life). Of course, if you want to
work on whatever you can do that as well. Delicious free food, but RSVP!
bit.ly/code-party-0

MC 2038,
2015-03-03,
6:00 PM:
Murphy Berzish explains how to programmatically determine if a program is satisfiable,
and how to find a concrete counterexample if it is unsatisfiable. At the core
are SAT/SMT solvers. SAT theory deals with Boolean Satisfiability solvers,
while SMT theory--Satisfiability Modulo a Theory--allows SMT to be extended
to common data structures. Free food!

MC 4040,
2015-03-09,
6:00 PM:
Javascript is fast. In some cases, very close to compiled-language fast.
How is this even possible? How do we know what types our variables have?
How can we optimize it well? Kannan Vijayan will be talking about the
historical advances in JIT-compilation of dynamically typed programs over
two days. Of course, both of those talks will have free food.